There are health benefits to breastfeeding for both mothers and their children. The preventive health effects of breastfeeding continue into adulthood, lowering rate of various chronic illnesses. African-American women, especially of lower socioeconomic status, are less likely to breastfeed in comparison to their racial and ethnic counterparts. The purpose of this study is to explore how Africa...

This paper describes how much families know about their health insurance coverage and investigates whether consumer education and simplified benefit structures would improve knowledge. Families' perceptions about their insurance benefits were measured in two household surveys administered in six sites. Knowledge was assessed by comparing families' responses with policy data collected from the c...

BACKGROUND We conducted a pilot test of American Cancer Society Workplace Solutions, an intervention that takes a marketing approach to increasing employers' adoption of evidence-based practices to prevent and control chronic diseases among their employees. CONTEXT We delivered the intervention and assessed the changes in practices of 8 large employers in the Pacific Northwest. METHODS Work...

Since the war the relative number of aged persons with income from employment has declined, while the proportion with income from social insurance benefits has increased. Despite the fact that social insurance benefits yield a lower average income than do earnings, the averaged aged person's income in 1952 was higher in both current dollars and dollars of stable purchasing power than it was in ...

The paper presents a model that allows a unified analysis of sickness absence and search unemployment. Sickness appears as random shocks to individual utility functions, interacts with individual search and labor supply decisions and triggers movements across labor force states. The employed worker prefers absence for sufficiently severe sickness and the unemployed worker may prefer nonparticip...

The Affordable Care Act broadens and strengthens the health insurance benefits available to consumers by requiring insurers to provide coverage of a minimum set of medical services known as "essential health benefits." Federal officials implemented this reform using transitional policies that left many important decisions to the states, while pledging to reassess that approach in time for the 2...

Unlike children in most other economically developed countries, children in the United States are not guaranteed health insurance coverage. Indeed, many U.S. children have no health insurance coverage at all. Their lack of coverage restricts their access to health care services: uninsured children have fewer physician visits per year than children with insurance and are less likely to have a us...

The ability to correctly code and document for purposes of physician reimbursement has become an increasingly essential part of long-term care (LTC) practice. As was pointed out by Stone and Tarnove in a recent article, “the complexity and nuances of these codes have cost physicians huge sums of money and actually have driven many excellent, caring physicians to stop providing services to our n...

conclusions we have demonstrated that ibgms, while not reaching statistical significance, may be associated with slightly reduced a1c and cost due to visiting physicians. results there is a trend of lowered total cost in the intervention group compared to the control group. the control group spent $210.89 per year on visits to physicians; the intervention group spent $131.26 (p = 0.128). patien...